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free licenses

"Within the framework of the author’s copyright that protects literary and artistic works, a growing number of authors choose to make their works available to the public with contracts of a very specific type called free licences. These licences allow anyone to distribute or perform copies of the work.

« With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution. »

"...This week Atheros Communications has made another step forward in enabling their wireless products on Linux. Atheros has released their HAL used for their 802.11a/b/g devices under the ISC. The ISC (or Internet Systems Consortium) is a BSD-derived free software license that is supported by the Free Software Foundation..."

"First of all, I don't want to blame individual persons. This is just a note of how disappointed I'm about some parts of Debian that are not complying to licenses when it comes to distributing software..."

"So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge [...] In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses.